Way to Go

By Richard Sanger

ONE OF CBC BOOKS’ BEST BOOKS OF 2023

A jubilant, irreverent, generous collection by a poet facing terminal illness.

Following his New York Times Best of the Year Dark Woods, Richard Sanger's fourth and final book is a clear-eyed and big-hearted inventory of the passions of a life well lived. Understated, tender, archly funny and achingly generous, Way to Go is a joyful catalog of Sanger's loves and a last gift from an irrepressibly jubilant poet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771965545

Richard Sanger

Richard Sanger (1960–2022) grew up in Ottawa and lived in Toronto. He published three poetry collections and a chapbook, Fathers at Hockey (2020); Dark Woods, was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2018 by the New York Times. His plays included Not Spain, Two Words for Snow, Hannah’s Turn, and Dive as well as translations of Calderon, Lorca, and Lope de Vega. He also published essays, reviews, and poetry translations.

Book preview

i.

Into the Park

Into the park in late summer on your bike,

the sudden chill of trees and shade, the breeze

down the front of your shirt

cool against your chest, linen rippling

a frisson tingling your nipples,

as the afternoon heat

lingering

on the grass starts to retreat,

the bike whirrs and into the park you go,

deeper, this is your park, you know

its groves, its benches, its three-storey trees,

depressions where rain gathers, puddles freeze,

and it changes every time—

that’s why you come, the anticipation,

you don’t know what you’ll find here,

as the shadows grow in the bushes, or who

you’ll meet at the bench

someone you know,

or someone new,

or someone you knew

a long time ago

now with eyes that have seen so much more

and lines in his face, or hers,

and deeper you go and further back

no idea what you’ll say when you meet, or do,

what new arrangements or conspiracies you’ll fall into,

what raw truths,

what entanglements, what dangers.

The Sands

Frown and wrinkled lip he’s got. Sunk in himself

on the sidewalk, head the same height

as the briefcases and exhaust pipes,

he sneers at the coins that drop. Taxis idle,

then pull out, buff his face with fumes.

When he coughs, it’s a truck that won’t start

some subzero morning in the trailer park.

Once it was his foot on the pedal, the tunes

blasting as he tore up the highway

to Fort Mac, Fort Chip. But he can’t go back,

not to that landscape. The tar, the trees, the sands,

the traplines that were his kingdom . . . All gone.

And the machines he drove—colossal wrecks—

rust like dinosaurs beside the tailing ponds.

Was It

Driving early one spring morning

out of the city, the two boys

in the back seat playing peek-a-boo,

the city, all glass, girders, concrete,

strip malls, Costcos, service stations

sprouted up here and there

so we can keep driving, taking the city

further and further out, and still find

not a speck of green in sight,

not a tree or leaf—is this what we do,

pave, encase, squish the living sap

out of the earth?—and now a laugh,

a titter starts and won’t cease, was it for this,

a giggle, a chortle deep-throated

like a crack opening in the asphalt

or a brook in early spring

galloping down a wooded slope,

over stones, sticks and clumps of ice,

was it for this we made the roads,

rampaged ahead without a thought,

over every obstacle we found:

dead black leaves, tree bark, rocky outcrops,

for this, we dynamited granite,

cut through hillsides, flattened the planet,

pausing only to regroup,